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The Charter Center is on the record in opposition to the State Education Department's (SED) assertion that charter schools are required to submit data about teacher evaluations according to the state's categories, whether or not that makes sense given the charter school's evaluation practices. (GothamSchools covered the disagreement last month.)

A flood of data is re-shaping American public education, nowhere more than in New York City. Yet there are still key topics in NYC education debates where the critical data are not publicly available, or do not exist at all. It's possible for city and state agencies to address these gaps in ways that enrich the public understanding of education, including charter schools, without placing a burden on the schools themselves.

Yesterday, the NYC Department of Education released its 2011-12 progress reports for high schools. (See our breakdown of the K-8 progress reports.) The reports assign a letter grade to each school, based on student test scores, student progress, attendance, and "learning environment" survey results, all heavily weighted to account for differing student characteristics.

That's how many students have enrolled in public charter schools nationwide, according to a new report from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. In 41 states and the District of Columbia, parents and educators have come together, voluntarily, seeking a high-quality public education.

In Monday's New York Post, James Merriman highlights several additional findings from the 2011-12 New York City Progress Reports, based on the full data set now available on the NYC DOE website. (Our initial analysis of the top-level letter grades can be found here.) The full data set provides numerical detail around several important trends, which we'll illustrate claim-by-claim...

Today, the NYC Department of Education (NYC DOE) released its 2011-12 Progress Reports for public schools serving grades K-8, including charter schools. Overall, charter schools' grades are improved from the previous year. Close to half (46%) of all charter schools received an A grade, compared to 25% of public schools citywide.

Creating a charter school often starts as an exhilarating project, filled with breakthrough curriculum ideas, ways to serve families where there are low-performing schools, and visions of better futures for children through superlative education.

The results are out from the NYC Department of Education's Learning Environment Surveys, a rich source of information on how parents, students, and teachers view their public schools (district and charter). This year's surveys elicited responses from over 476,000 parents, over 62,000 teachers, and over 428,000 students in grades 6-12. (Charter schools' collective responses rates were higher than the city average among all three groups.)

Nobody does scientific caution like Matt Di Carlo, blogger for the union-affiliated Albert Shanker Institute. Though "not so fast" isn't the sexiest message in education debates, we could surely use more fair-minded and careful voices like his. But this week, Di Carlo takes his caution to the extreme...